Companies that need to contact their clients, debtors, and other parties that they have relationships with, often spend significant amounts of money employing large numbers of human operators to make telephone call to the parties of interest. For example, in the case of debt collection, a company may deploy large groups of human telephone operators at one or more call centers to place telephone calls to the various debtors. The cost of completing such phone calls is, in many cases, a significant percentage of a call center's operating budget. As may be appreciated, the primary expense of generating the multiple telephone calls is the labor component.
In the specific case of debt collection, the expenses for operating a call center or generating the multiple calls are offset by the call center's effectiveness in collecting on the outstanding debts and reducing the number of accounts that become so-called “bad debt”. While completing calls with human operators is expensive, contacting consumers in a timely manner is often important in avoiding an accounting write-off or “bad debt”, which results in reduced earnings for the company.
To reduce the expense of the operators and other labor that is required to generate and complete a phone call, many call centers now deploy software and hardware systems that are designed to improve operator productivity. The systems are commonly referred to as automated call systems. Such automated call systems make and control (“generate”) outgoing calls based on data stored in a database, file system, or other computer-readable medium, storing information regarding the clients, debtors, or other party to be contacted. The systems typically use pre-recorded and/or synthesized speech, call logic, DTMF (dual tone multiple frequency, or touch-tone) and/or voice input by the called party (interactive voice response or “IVR”), to automate the interaction with the called party. This frees up operators from part of the task associated with generating and completing a call. The automatic part of the call collects data from the called party, in the form of isolated responses, events and/or call history. This information is used to further guide the call, such as to direct it to a human operator, and to improve the overall efficiency of the operators and other call center employees.
In the case of debt collection, for example, one goal is to automatically collect information relating to various aspects of the called parties, such as: (1) their identity, (2) their intent to work with the creditor to resolve the debt, (3) why their account is overdue, (4) the resolution of their debt, and (5) any other information necessary for the collections process.
During an automated outbound call system's operation, multiple simultaneous calls are initiated, to standard voice telephone lines. When the calls are answered by the called party, the system asks the called party a series of questions relating to receivables that are owed to the collector for services rendered to them, by playing pre-recorded or synthesized speech over the phone lines. Depending on how the patient responds to questions the calls branch to additional questions providing and capturing information. For example if the patient has confirmed their identity, indicated that they have insurance and indicated that they would like to fax a copy of their insurance card to the provider, then the call will provide the appropriate fax number to the patient. The called party's DTMF responses (or spoken responses recognized using speech recognition technology, and codified as symbols) are passed back to the call generation system. The system then makes a decision of continued interaction based on the responses, combined with so-called call logic, which dictates the course of action for all possible states of the call.
While currently offered automated outbound call systems can deliver various benefits, such as increasing the efficiency of using human operators and thus reducing the overall labor costs per volume of calls generated and completed, they have some significant limitations. First, there is substantial time and expense associated with the purchase, implementation and maintenance of automated outbound call center productivity systems at the customer's premises. For example, if transfer rate of outgoing calls to a human operator at a call center is 5% (a common rate), then hardware, software, and lines to handle 20 outgoing calls are necessary for each employed operator at the call center. This makes deploying automated solutions for outbound call generation terribly expensive and inefficient. Furthermore, it is difficult to determine if and when the benefits exceed the expenses, because much of the cost is incurred prior to operation of the system and the savings generally occur in later periods. Accurately predicting the future savings of these systems can also be difficult. The task of calculating the system's future return on investment is often made even more difficult by an inability for a business to predict its capacity, geography, regulatory and feature requirements. Unanticipated requirements are especially challenging when the modification and upgrade of the system at the customer's or user's premises requires a substantial delay. Many call centers have a different set of requirements by the time the system is operational. These specification changes have eliminated the economic benefit of many call center productivity projects and can make it a poor place to make capital system investments.
Some current automated, outbound call center systems have tried to address the expenses associated with the purchasers and maintenance of these systems by utilizing Internet technologies to provide a more convenient interface. These systems come in a wide variety of configurations. However, all of the systems contain substantial automated outbound system components that are in the same physical location as the operators. Others have designed individual automated systems that operate remote from the client's telephone agents or call center. However, all of the current automated, outbound systems are based on the assumption that the hardware and software needed for their operation be located at the user's call center site, and that the software be closely integrated with the user's back-end system, thus increasing the time it takes to integrate and maintain the system's services. These systems also generally require that the user's site be specifically staffed for running the system on site, thus increasing the labor and time costs for ensuring the proper desired operation. Therefore, there is still a need in the prior art to increase the cost effectiveness and productivity of a call center. At the same time it is desirable to reduce the overall capital costs of simply installing an expensive automated call system at the user's premises. Until now, existing systems have not addressed these needs and other needs in the industry.